Posted by: SCarpelan

I was an emergency Santa for a neighbor's kids when I was in my late teens. Her regular one couldn't make it and she asked me to take his place and paid 50 marks for it. She had all the other Santa stuff for me except a walking staff (we felt I needed one to make my old person performance believable) so I ended up using my hockey stick as an improvised walking staff. The younger kid was so scared that he didn't notice anything but the older one who was too old to believe in Santa came to me after Christmas and told me he had noticed that "Santa's" staff was very familiar looking...

Nuuttipukki is actually the same character as Kekripukki (kekri being the old Finnish harvest celebration, i.e. our version of Halloween) and he was adapted into Joulupukki when the Santa tradition came to Finland from Sweden.

Posted by: Askold

Santa / Father Christmas being hired to come to parties/families? Yes.

Santa brings gifts to children. That's his thing. That's why having someone dressed as santa come to your home to deliver the kids is a thing we do. Why would kids believe in santa if they never saw him? It's a seasonal job for people pretending to be Santa. Not much unlike the "Mall Santa" job that USA has according to movies.

Though the tradition has changed over the years, Joulupukki used to be a lot more scary and his evil counterpart "Nuuttipukki" has pretty much fallen out of tradition nowadays as well. (Nuuttipukki would be a drunken masked creature wearing furs who comes to your door after Christmas demanding to have beer. If you don't give him beer then he has the right to break or sabotage something. Kinda like the Halloween trick or treat thingy that USA has.)